The fortunes of the two Western expatriates running in Tallinn's municipal election ended up being as different as they could be yesterday, with UK citizen Abdul Turay (Social Democrat) outperforming several well-known politicians and Joeri Wiersma of the Netherlands (independent) receiving only 32 votes.

Turay pulled in an impressive 516 votes, the second highest result among Social Democrat candidates running in the City Center district. Within that group, he was behind only mayoral hopeful Andres Anvelt, a result that, in theory, could put Turay in line for a seat on the city council.

Among the Social Democrat candidates, Turay had the eighth-highest vote total in Tallinn as a whole and the party is likely to get eight seats. However, in the case of Tallinn, seats are awarded separately for each of the eight districts. Vote totals are not the only means used to determine which candidate gets a seat in these local elections.

"I was pleasantly surprised. I did better than a lot of well known people," Turay told ERR News on Monday.

He was, however, circumspect about his win.

"Let's get things in perspective. There wasn't a groundswell of support for me. A lot of it is about celebrity status. I understand that I have a niche status. I'm never going to get as many votes as Savisaar," he said.

Commenting on the relatively poor showing for his party overall, Turay said he believed that Social Democrats had made strategic errors in their campaign

"I think that the election slogan was wrong. 'Today Tallinn, tomorrow Toompea' - it's what we want, not what we're going to give you." He added that the campaign should have focused more on attacking the Center Party rather than on competing with Reform.

Wiersma, who ran in the same district as a representative of his European Whistleblowers Party, said that the low number of votes he received came as a surprise.

"My first impression was that it was a little bit low. I was imagining and expecting a little bit more," he said. "But of course the campaign was concentrated on [only] a few persons," he continued, expressing disappointment about how difficult it was to stir up the Estonian media's interest in lesser-known candidates.

He said that though he did not meet his first goal, to win a seat on the city council, he had achieved his second, which was to draw attention to the Whistleblowers Party and its aims.

Wiersma also said that the experience of campaigning in Tallinn was something of an "exercise" that would help him learn what to expect in the run-up to next year's European Parliament elections, where he plans to run as an independent candidate representing Estonia.

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The mining park's new visitor center, the only one in Europe dedicated to the oil shale industry and based in the former mining and sorting premises of Kohtla mine, opened on Saturday. The center has different interactive displays that introduce the field of energetic and geology to children and adults alike.

Reili Argus, a professor of Estonian at the TU Institute of Estonian Language and Culture says mastering a language does not depend on how difficult or complicated a language is deemed to be. Children are able to master the most complicated grammar at an early age and with little to no effort. It turns out that the richer the grammar is, the earlier children grasp it.

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Lembit Ulfsak, the star of the Oscar-nominated Estonian-Georgian movie "Tangerines", said that although the film's potential was clear to him from the moment he first laid eyes on the script, none of the crew members had even dreamt that it would be the first ever Estonian movie to be nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Oscar.

As the books finally come to a close on what can only be described as a disastrous year for East-West relations, Russia's increasingly hostile antics and looming financial implosion continue to give its nearest neighbors the jitters.

Mart Raukas, who has organized crisis training for more than 100 schools over the years, says he senses high tension in schools and that the teaching profession has become less attractive following Estonia's first fatal school shooting, in which a 15-year-old targeted a teacher of German.

On ETV's “Foorum” program, politicians from the four major political parties weighed in on the security situation in Estonian schools, saying that although schools are prepared for events such as the one on October 27, more prevention work must be done.

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Hundreds of people gathered Saturday night and Sunday at the "Broken Line" monument on Suur Rannavärav bastion in Tallinn in memory of those who lost their lives on the MS Estonia ferry, which sank in the early morning of September 28, 1994, between Tallinn and Stockholm.